Resource library

SEO and marketing insights

Practical articles about search, content, paid media, social platforms, local business and web strategy.

Insight

27 Hardcore Link Building Techniques

We’ve all seen our share of lists with link building techniques. This list is meant for those with a lot of ambition, who are willing to put in a lot of time or money to see a big payoff.

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3 Common Online Marketing Mistakes No Day Spa Should Make

If you’re having trouble reaching customers online, you could be making one of these mistakes.

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3 Things Every Blogger Wished they Knew Before they Started

For those who’ve been at it, it’s time to get reflective. If you’re new to the game, maybe you’ll save yourself some heartache.

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3-2-1 Launch. More Tips

Somewhat like money, getting people to come to your new online identity doesn’t grow on trees.

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6 Major Facebook Changes in the Past Month

Facebook has been making some major changes over the past month as it pushes toward mobile.

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6 SEO Mistakes that are Hurting Your Business

As a business owner, you’ve undoubtedly heard about digital marketing and how it can build traffic to your website.

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Adapting to Google’s Gradual Panda Rollout

This month, Google made a significant update to its Panda algorithm, an algorithm that is designed to target low quality content.

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An Introduction to Foursquare Marketing

With nearly 30 million people using the platform, Foursquare has dominated the local mobile experience.

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Are You Spending Money to Make Money, or Just Spending Money?

If there’s one thing every business owner should know, it’s that it doesn’t pay to be stingy.

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Bing Starts Drama With Google On Valentine’s Day

Microsoft cites the fact that Google Shopping now includes only paid results as evidence that the search engine is no longer trustworthy.

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Broad Niche or Narrow Niche?

The answer to that question is complex, and differs depending on your business strategy and size.

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Cash In on Facebook App Ads While They’re Still Hot

According to a Facebook ad partner, AdParlor, clicks and conversions for app advertisements are doing tremendously well.

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Do You Have a Business Idea, or a Business?

Stop perfecting your idea. Stop making projections. Stop putting together a proposal to pitch to bankers.

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Do You Have What it Takes-Get to Profit as Soon as Possible

On March 20, 2000, the financial markets realized that the dot-com bubble had burst.

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Don’t Get Fooled by Cheap SEO

You’ve got a website. But it’s growing cobwebs. No one is coming to check you out. You ask around until you get to some geeky kid that works in shipping.

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Don’t Hide Your Ideas

One question business consultants get asked a lot is how important things like patents are.

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Don’t Let Negative SEO Fears Discourage Linking

In pretty much the strangest example of an SEO misconception, a lawyer recently threatened to sue the webmaster of a blog called Big Pink Cookie.

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Don’t Slam Guest Posting, Do it Right

The guest post has become such a popular SEO strategy that it is starting to become a staple for many of the companies in the industry.

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Driving Directions Apps, Who’s Winning?

More and more frequently, your customers are finding you on their smartphones, and taking driving directions from them as well.

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EMD is Dead, Long Live Keyword Research

Okay, a lot of things are “king” in this industry. (Content, links, users, conversions).

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Facebook

Marketers who have invested any time in Facebook know that it can under perform quite spectacularly when you don’t know what you’re doing.

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Facebook Loosens Marketing Restrictions (For Once)

The removal of these restrictions isn’t a free for all just yet, though.

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Foursquare Users Can Check in their Friends, Here’s How to Take Advantage

Local social site Foursquare recently introduced a new feature to their app.

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Getting Facebook Subscribers, and Keeping Them

There’s nothing more helpful for a brand than loyal customers who keep coming back and help get the word out.

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Google Now Reports Nearly All Manual Penalties

The important thing to recognize, however, is that reconsideration requests only apply to manual penalties.

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Google Plus — The Focused Facebook

Seems as if everyone in the world knows about Facebook. From Texas to Taiwan, chances are a large chunk of the planet’s population has a Facebook account.

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Google+

Some of you might have recently heard that the Google+ Local app for iPhone is being retired because almost nobody was using it.

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Google+, Maps, and Local See Big Changes

Google’s much neglected local space is finally seeing a major overhaul that could make the future for the platform clearer.

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Guest Posting for Direct Traffic

SEOs are more than familiar with guest posts, but primarily as a means of getting links for search engine visibility.

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How and Why You Should Outsource Digital Marketing

The fixed costs are one of the biggest reasons outsourcing is preferable.

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How to Create Truly Unique Content

Search marketing firm WordStream recently demonstrated just how powerful a unique piece of content can be.

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How to Dominate Your Niche with Facebook Graph Search

Facebook recently rolled out graph search for everybody. Added features make the tool especially helpful for marketers.

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How to Get Guest Posts, Step by Step

Formulas can be troublesome. Any easily executable series of instructions eventually gets abused until it loses it’s value.

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Identifying Target Keywords Fast

When it comes to your biggest content, there’s a good chance you’ll want to invest more time in keyword research, and weighing the pros and cons of traffic verses competition.

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Inbound Marketing for Local Businesses

According to a study by Harris Interactive, nearly 70 percent of adults rarely or never use the phone book.

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Keyword Tools? Why Not Keyword Surveys?

SEOs love the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and most of the alternative keyword tools more or less scrape it for data.

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Leaked Google Quality Rater Guidelines

Google employs teams of quality raters to test the effectiveness of their search algorithms.

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Link Building

In case you missed it, link building is the bread and butter of SEO. If your site isn’t getting talked about, the search engines assume you aren’t offering anything of value.

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Link Building and the Science of Persuasion

Search engine optimization is often more about things that you can’t control directly than things you can.

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Link Building is Easy When You Start With Content

In a backlash against shady SEO techniques that use automation and spam, many of the biggest names in the industry have proclaimed that link building is supposed to be hard.

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LinkedIn: Worth it for Businesses?

According to ComScore, LinkedIn is the most popular social network in the US except for Facebook, with 43 million unique visitors.

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LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Strategy is Working

Us digital marketers are well aware of the power behind content marketing, but it’s rare to see big name companies using it so well.

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Local Social Marketing for Small Businesses

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve been revisiting some of the basics of local SEO and inbound marketing.

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Making the Most of a Facebook Contest or Campaign

Facebook contests are nothing new, and it takes a bit of creativity and a unique approach to stand out from your competitors.

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Measure Twice, Cut Once

It’s almost impossible to be an entrepreneur or a marketing professional without knowing something about metrics.

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Pay Per Click Advertising for Local Businesses

Let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can take advantage of this advertising model and keep costs down.

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Pinterest, Fancy, Wanelo, Where to Start?

Ever since an online pin board called Pinterest took over the web just about overnight, the web has started to look a bit different.

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Processes Matter More than Goals

If there’s one ubiquitous think all managers agree on, it’s that you need to set goals in order to get where you want to go.

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Pulling Users Below the Fold

A call-to-action above the fold does better than one below. This is not a secret to marketers.

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Questions Come Before Answers

As entrepreneurs and business professionals, theories and abstraction don’t usually interest us very much.

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Solve the Problem Your Users Want Solved

What should your content look like? How should you be running your social media campaigns?

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Sometimes a Blog Works Better Than the Rest of the Website

A white noise website, unless you’ve built a better mousetrap and have managed to get to the top of search engine results, means that you probably don’t have a lot of people dropping by.

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Take Advantage of the New Google+ Plugins

A year ago, it looked like Google+ was all but dead. More recent numbers suggest it’s even bigger than Twitter, and it comes with added search engine visibility on top of that.

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Take Me to Your Keyword – A Guide for Aliens

Pretend you’re in an elevator. Standing next to you is a venture capitalist. This woman carefully makes decisions on which start-ups get some of her investor’s money.

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Taxes and Website Construction – Is It Tax Deductable?

You’re a small business. The kid in the stockroom catches you in the hallway one day, again chiding you for not having a website.

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The Four Part Online Marketing Strategy: Part 1 – Reputation

Over the next four weeks we’ll be covering a comprehensive online marketing strategy revolving around four cornerstones: reputation, reach, resell, and referral.

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The Four Part Online Marketing Strategy: Part 2 – Reach

Last week we discussed reputation: the way you are perceived online. Today we’ll be talking about reach, your ability to influence consumers through the web.

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The Four Part Online Marketing Strategy: Part 4 – Referral

Over the past several weeks, we’ve talked about the life cycle of online marketing. You need a solid reputation to build trust with your consumers, and reach in order to influence them.

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The Future of Links as a Ranking Signal

The head of the Google spam team, Matt Cutts, has said that links will remain an important ranking signal for the foreseeable future.

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The Need for Experiments

Have you heard something like this before: “Marketing’s no longer an art, it’s a science.” I hate that stance, because it implies that science and art are somehow polar opposites.

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The Value of a Tweet, According to Twitter

Twitter recently updated its API to assign value to tweets. The update is intended for developers, so that future apps will be able to more easily identify which tweets are most important.

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Twitter

Everybody knows that Twitter is one of the biggest social networks out there, and that it can be a good place to boost brand impressions and build up an online following.

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Twitter Analytics is Open, Now What?

Twitter recently surprised the business community by quietly opening up its analytics tools to all users without so much as making an announcement.

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Using Display Ads to Build Links

SEOs are often at odds with PPC marketers and the like. We hate spending money on traffic that will disappear as soon as we stop opening our pockets.

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Using Flickr Photographers to Build Links

If the success of Pinterest has reminded us of anything, it’s the growing importance of visual content on the web.

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What Does Conversion Rate Optimization Concept Mean?

Sure is swell to have someone come visit your website. You look at the stats. It appears you have about a thousand different folks drop by every day.

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What Goes Into Making a Website Mobile?

The theory holds true with a website, too. It may look perfect in a variety of different browsers on that 19-inch screen in your office.

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What Improv Can Teach Us About Business

There is a rule in the realm of theater called improv, where the performances are made up on the fly.

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What is a Micro Niche Website?

Yeah, right? Creating a micro niche website doesn’t come in a box. It takes some fairly hard work to become a webillionaire.

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What Makes a Press Release Important?

Do you like free advertising or are you like that cute kid in the credit card commercials with Jimmy Fallon who is always turning up her nose at getting an extra gift of money?

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When it Comes to Yelp, Customer Service is King

Short of Google+ and Google search, almost nothing on the web affects small business more than Yelp.

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Why Blogs are More Influential than Social Networks

According to Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report, blogs have more influence over consumers than social networks.

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Why Incentives are a Double Edged Sword

When business is growing stagnant, competitors are pulling ahead, and the future looks dire, things need to change.

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Why You Need Links that Bring Traffic

There is a vocal minority in the SEO community who believe that optimization is all about building links, regardless of where the links come from or how they are obtained.

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You Only Need to Get One Thing Right

Management, marketing, and business are prone to clutter. It’s so tempting to jump on the next trend, to embrace the newest tactic.

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“Non-Commercial” Search Terms, SEO’s Future?

We’ve briefly mentioned the possibility of targeting less commercial search terms before, but this subject is important enough that it deserves expanding upon.